SAUL GONZALEZ, correspondent: At a Los Angeles ceremony, a group of Catholic women is about to commit an act of religious faith, but because they are women it’s an act the Vatican has condemned as a grave crime against the Roman Catholic Church and what the church sees as its divine laws.

“Bishop Olivia and members of the community, I am honored to testify on behalf of Jennifer’s readiness to be ordained to the priesthood.”

GONZALEZ: In a faith that prohibits females from becoming priests, these women are rebels, gathering here this afternoon to ordain this woman, Jennifer O’Malley, as a Catholic priest.

(to Jennifer O’Malley): Do you love the Catholic Church?

JENNIFER O’MALLEY: I do. It’s who I am, so I can’t leave. You know, I’ve gone to other churches and they’re beautiful, but I’m Catholic, and I can’t separate myself from that.

GONZALEZ: O’Malley is a member of a group called Roman Catholic Women Priests. It was started in 2002 when seven women, in an act of defiance against the Vatican, were ordained as priests by a male bishop in Europe. Ever since, the group’s been fighting for full acceptance of women into the priesthood. In the last decade, Roman Catholic Women Priests has ordained more than 100 women in ceremonies similar to this one for Jennifer O’Malley.

“We choose you our sister Jennifer for the order of priesthood. Thanks be to God.”

GONZALEZ: The ordinations are held in non-Catholic churches and definitely without the sanction or recognition of the Catholic Church. In fact, under Vatican policy O’Malley’s ordination, like the women who have done this before her, brings automatic excommunication. That means she’s barred from receiving the church’s sacraments or participating in the liturgy, unless she repents.

O’MALLEY: You know, in a sense it’s hurtful, and the fact that I’m being excommunicated by people who don’t even know me. But on the other hand, again, it is a consequence of doing what God has called me to do.

GONZALEZ: And your response to those who think at worst this is heresy, out and out, and at best some sort of a stunt, really. What do you say to them?

O’MALLEY: You know, it’s a call from God, and I believe it to be a true call, so those other things have to be put aside. And if that means breaking a law within the church, I know within myself, within my intellect and emotionally, that it is the right thing to do.

GONZALEZ: Catholic leaders, of course, see the ordination of women very differently.

REV. THOMAS RAUSCH (Professor of Catholic Theology, Loyola Marymount University): The Catholic Church is not ready for the ordination of women right now.

GONZALEZ: Father Thomas Rausch is a priest and professor of Catholic theology at L.A.’s Loyola Marymount University.

RAUSCH: As far as the church is concerned, these are not valid ordinations. Ordination is an act of the whole church, and this is not an act of the whole church. In a sense, this is an act against the communion of the whole church. It is very difficult to call yourself a Roman Catholic if you are not living in communion with the Roman Catholic Church, and communion means you are recognized by the bishop and you have this network of relationships, which is…It’s the kind of glue that holds the Catholic Church together

GONZALEZ: The theological justification most often cited for barring women from the Catholic priesthood goes back to Jesus’ choice of men only to be his disciples. That was followed by centuries of male-dominated customs developed within the church.

RAUSCH: I think that, you know, the culture was patriarchal. It was very much male-centered. Males were educated. They took roles of leadership. They played leading roles in the churches. So I think those cultural reasons really have to be taken into account in order to understand the exclusion of women from ordained ministry in the life of the church.

GONZALEZ: Although there was talk about the possible ordination of women in the wake of Vatican II 50 years ago, in re cent decades the church has taken a tougher stand against the idea of women in the priesthood. In 2008, the Vatican formally declared its policy of excommunication of women who completed ordination. That was followed two years later by the listing of the ordination of women as a “grave crime” against Catholic sacramental law. The church says it’s taken these steps to maintain theological purity and centuries of Catholic tradition and unity. Many who favor the ordination of women, though, say sexism and chauvinism are the real reasons women are barred from the Catholic priesthood.

JANE VIA: When I chose to get ordained, it was because I feel that intelligent, articulate women must act to try to change the church.

GONZALEZ: Jane Via is a Catholic woman priest in San Diego.

VIA: I realized there are no clergymen who are going to stand up to this authoritarian, totalitarian, patriarchal, sexist system, because they have too much invested.

GONZALEZ: Via is one the most prominent figures in the women Catholic priests movement; partly that’s because of her unusual background. Along with having a PhD in theology, Via was also an assistant district attorney in San Diego for over 25 years. That courtroom experience, she says, has helped her in her present conflict with the leaders of the Catholic Church. Via says the evidence she’s gathered shows women had a prominent role in the early church.

VIA: There no are no scriptural barriers to the ordination of women, and the first 300-400 years of the early church I believe the evidence shows clearly included the ordination of women as deacons, the ordination of women as priests, and the ordination of women as bishops.

“Let us pray.”

GONZALEZ: Via leads a congregation in San Diego, with masses held in a borrowed Lutheran church.

Via blessing child: “Giles, God bless you and keep you…”

GONZALEZ: Although worship services here aren’t recognized by the local Catholic archdiocese, Via carries out all of the typical duties of a male priest. The people who attend mass here say that despite this congregation’s outsider status within the Catholic Church, they’re secure in their own religious identities.

(to congregants) How do you identify yourself? What’s your faith?

Group of congregants: Roman Catholic.

(to congregant): What would you say to your fellow Catholics watching this who look at this and see a woman as priest and say that just isn’t real, and the mass you’ve gone to has no legitimacy.

Congregant: For me it is real. It’s as real as a male priest standing there. What’s the difference? Just because one is a woman and one is a man? I don’t think God distinguishes.

GONZALEZ: But Via acknowledges that her battle with the Catholic Church has cost her, from broken friendships to the pain of excommunication.

VIA: I remember being really grieved about not being able to be buried in a Catholic cemetery. That was sort of the ultimate exclusion. You can’t take the sacraments. I knew I would be excommunicated so I knew I could not accept the sacraments in a canonical Catholic church anymore, unless I was unknown to the population there, which is hard for me to be in San Diego.

GONZALEZ: What do you say to those who would say join another community of faith, join another faith, become something else, but don’t stay in the Catholic Church with your views. You would say what?

VIA: For me to just turn my back on this institution and say, “You’re all a bunch of worthless idiots, and I’m not participating anymore. I’m going to do my own thing. I’m going to go be Episcopalian and I can be a priest there” is completely irresponsible. This is my community. If everyone who is progressive-minded, progressive thinking, and willing to stand up to the Vatican leaves the church, the church will never change.

O’MALLEY (at altar): “…and for this we always thank and praise you.”

Ceremony: “We join with the saints of all times and places as they sing forever to your glory.”

GONZALEZ: Yet despite the hardening position of the church against their movement and its ordinations, the women Catholic priests say they aren’t retreating. They say they believe that although they might not see it in their own lifetimes, women will one day be allowed to become Roman Catholic priests—and with the support and blessings of the Vatican.

BOB FAW, correspondent: This enrichment music class at St. Stephen Catholic School in New York City is part of a new experiment to help save Catholic schools.

In a Philadelphia suburb at Conwell-Egan Catholic High School, this too is part of the effort to keep Catholic schools open. Here students devise real solutions for real-world problems.

The new approaches are needed. For the last decade, 26 percent of Catholic schools have closed. Because of the recession, funding is down, the cost of running the schools is up, and enrollments have plummeted.

DR. JOHN CONVEY (Professor of Education, Catholic University): There has been a drop in enrollment, and over the last 30 or 40 years it’s over two million fewer students. From my point of view, it’s a crisis.

FAW: The situation is so dire, says the bishop in charge of the archdiocesan schools in Philadelphia, something entirely different—call it an educational “Hail, Mary”—was needed.

BISHOP MICHAEL FITZGERALD (Archdiocese of Philadelphia): We’re in this because our educational system was imploding. Enrollment-wise, finance-wise, something radical—radical surgery had to be done. We cannot do it the same old way.

FAW: So the archdiocese has now given management of 21 of its schools, including Conwell-Egan and schools in the inner city, to a private foundation called Faith in the Future. It will help sell the schools to potential students and raise millions of dollars by appealing to alumni and wealthy donors, led by former chief of Cigna insurance Ed Hanway, who says the foundation can do what the archdiocese could not.

EDWARD HANWAY (Chairman, Faith in the Future Foundation): The resources of the archdiocese are extremely limited. We can bring resources to bear on certain issues that the archdiocese may not have been able to, For example, admissions management, outreach into the community, and building a formal, structured marketing plan for our schools.

FAW: The education at the schools run by the foundation will remain decidedly Catholic. This theology class for freshmen is still taught by a Franciscan brother. And, as always, students are required to go to mass throughout the year. In just one year here, because of the foundation’s new business model, this school, slated for closing not that long ago, has seen enrollment increase.

JANET DOLLARD (President, Conwell-Egan Catholic High School): We have more freedom, in a sense, in that initiatives that we have are now supported by the Faith in the Future Foundation. So it’s a matter of greater resources, greater leveraging of funds to acquire the resources that we need to be successful.

FAW: Other Catholic schools in large cities often can’t survive because of diminishing funds and rising costs. Gone are the days when nuns, who for a small stipend, did most of the teaching at Catholic schools. Many have been replaced with lay teachers.

CONVEY: Now when you have to pay a living wage to a lay teacher, that started that acceleration of the cost, and when that started to happen, the tuitions didn’t go up fast enough.

FAW: And subsidy funding to these schools from the parishes and archdiocese has dried up because of the recession and changing demographics. If a neighborhood gets poorer, there often isn’t enough money to keep the schools open.

CONVEY: It is an anguishing situation, because the church wants to serve the poor. The church has what it calls a preferential option for the poor, and when the church gets into a difficult situation in terms of financially they’re not able to provide for the poor, that’s very anguishing.

FAW: The Catholic mission of serving the poor is one of the values that the Faith in the Future Foundation is working to maintain. Ed Hanway says the foundation will delegate a portion of its money for scholarships and is supporting many Catholic schools in the inner city.

HANWAY: That’s a terrific opportunity for us to direct funds into those underserved communities where the poorest of the poor exist, and where our schools provide a terrific value for them.

Principal greeting students: Good morning. Good job, Max. Good job. Good morning.

FAW: The neighborhood of this New York City Catholic school was once poor.

Student: Good morning, Ms. Peck.

FAW: But as the area gentrified and principal Katherine Peck was brought in to run St. Stephen, it went from nearly closing to thriving. Inside, there are enrichment programs galore, like this French class…and violin recitals and classes.

Michael and Karen Carbone’s two children, Emily and Michael, attend St. Stephen School.

KAREN CARBONE: We looked at a lot of schools and this school was right up there with the independent schools, especially in terms of the extras and things that it was offering.

FAW: To attract more affluent parents, Katherine Peck offered what expensive independent schools offer, only at a much lower price. To do this she started an aggressive campaign to raise money and got the neighborhood involved.

KATHERINE PECK (Principal, St. Stephen Catholic School). Everything that we’ve done here has been based on the community and student interest, parent interest, and other stakeholders in the school, whether it be parishioners or donors to the school, and so we’ve gone out in the last three years and said, “What is it that you believe you would want in a school for your own child, and how can we make that happen here?”

KAREN CARBONE: To see the demise of Catholic schools has been something that has pained me for years. And the fact that this is doing an about-face, and we’re a part of that, and our children are a part of the school turning around is really—it’s special in a lot of ways for us.

Teacher in classroom: One, seven, three. Next.

FAW: Tuition at St. Stephen averages $6500 a year. Parents are more than willing to pay.

MICHAEL CARBONE: It’s just such a special place. The teachers, the curriculum, I think what we’re looking for was a place that was nurturing, but also a rigorous, rigorous academic program.

FAW: Parents love St. Stephen because of the values a Catholic education helps instill. L.E. Hartman-Ting and Dr. Leon Ting’s twins are in second grade.

L.E. HARTMAN-TING: The values here are, our children are—they’re kind, and being kind and talking about their spirituality are things that happen in the classroom. We have seen our kids evolve. They’re moral creatures, and it’s just so important to us.

FAW: While three-quarters of the students at St. Stephen and Conwell-Egan are Catholic, non-Catholics feel right at home.

FAW (to Emily Conte): Do you feel awkward in any way not being a Catholic? You go to mass, for example.

EMILY CONTE (Conwell-Egan Student): No, it’s just like when they eat the body of Christ, you just cross your arms, and they still, like, everybody accepts you anyways.

FAW: Success at St. Stephen has come at a price: diversity. The percentage of black and Hispanic students is lower now than before. If some grumble that St. Stephen isn’t exactly serving the poor, Katherine Peck begs to differ.

PECK: I don’t think the mission of Catholic schools is just to educate the poor. I think it’s to educate all students and to be tolerant of everyone and to serve a parish and a neighborhood, and before, we weren’t really serving the parishioners, and we weren’t serving the neighborhood. We were barely serving anyone with 156 students, whereas now, today we’re serving 261 students, and we are a neighborhood-based community school.

FAW: The question now is whether the private foundation approach here in Pennsylvania, or that enriched curriculum approach in New York City, are isolated examples or models that can be replicated in financially troubled Catholic schools around the country.

HANWAY: Can that be replicated? I think it can. But our key is let’s make it work here, and let’s learn how we can marry the notion of strong Catholic values, Catholic education, that Catholic identity with much more professional, business-oriented management of these schools.

FAW: At St. Stephen, Katherine Peck agrees there is no magic formula.

PECK: Every school has different needs, so the strategic plan that comes out of it is not a one-size-fits-all. For us, implementing enrichment programmings and changing the way we were teaching and our instruction was a great benefit to us. For another school, it might be having ESL programs and having parent workshops at night.

CONVEY: Leadership is absolutely critical in any kind of a private school to make sure that the school thrives. Sixty to seventy percent of those schools are at risk because they had a leadership problem at some point, and they’ve never recovered from it. So leadership is the absolute key.

FAW: Although enrollment at Conwell-Egan is growing, and St. Stephen no longer runs at a deficit, it is premature to call each experiment a complete success.

Students in classroom: Oh, it’s coming out, Bill. Oh, oh.

FAW: But these two schools, once perilously close to closing, do give reason for optimism. For now at least, the music has never seemed sweeter.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: Both presidential candidates this week issued direct video appeals to faith-based voters. President Obama’s video came with the launch of a new campaign project called “People of Faith for Obama”:

OBAMA: “I’m asking for your support because we have more work to do to build an economy where families are valued and secure, and expand opportunity, extend compassion and pursue the common good.”

ABERNETHY: Meanwhile, Governor Romney’s campaign released a video that was played for religious conservatives at the Values Voter summit in Washington last weekend:

ROMNEY: “All we ask is that between now and November 6th, you join us and commit like never before. This election can come down to just one more vote. I ask you to find that one vote, ask one more person to join our campaign.”

ABERNETHY: Our managing editor Kim Lawton has been covering the campaigns. Kim, what do we know so far from the polls about how faith-based people are dividing?

KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly): Well, of course, it’s just a snapshot for right now but there were some new numbers this week that suggested that evangelicals, that all important group for Republicans, do seem to be supporting Mitt Romney at around the same levels they supported John McCain, which is very high, so that’s good news for Governor Romney. Catholics seem to be more divided as they were last time around although some new numbers this week suggest that they are leaning more towards Obama as they did in the last election. I was surprised to see this week numbers suggesting that mainline Protestants, who went principally for John McCain last time around or slightly more for John McCain, are, more of them are leaning towards Obama this time around.

ABERNETHY: Is there anything at all in the data to suggest that Romney’s religion is making any difference?

LAWTON: Well, in these snapshots that we have right now it doesn’t appear to be the case. Some people had wondered if evangelicals would not be supporting him because he’s a Mormon and some evangelicals are concerned about that, had raised concerns about voting for a Mormon candidate. Doesn’t appear to be that way, however, people have to get to the polls for it to actually matter, you know, turnout is what counts. I was surprised in the video this week that Mitt Romney released, he never once mentioned his Mormon faith and some people had suggested that he might be talking about it more. He didn’t this week.

ABERNETHY: Not talking about it perhaps because it is a matter of concern for a lot of evangelical Protestants?

LAWTON: Well, that’s what some people are wondering if he just doesn’t want to raise it, he doesn’t want to raise it.

ABERNETHY: And the issue of religious liberty, quickly, for the Catholic leadership.

LAWTON: That’s something President Obama stressed in his video this week. He said “I’m firmly committed to religious liberty and always will be.” That’s an issue that some Catholics, particularly in the hierarchy, had been challenging him on. Again, it doesn’t seem to be hitting the grassroots right now.

]]>At the opening night (June 14) of the third annual BuddhaFest film festival in Arlington, Virginia, we asked attendees to talk about their attraction to Buddhism. Watch an audio slideshow of the interviews, and listen to American University Buddhist chaplain Bhante Uparatana lead a Buddhist chant during the opening ceremony. Photographs by Sam Pinczuk. Interviews and editing by Fred Yi. Chant audio provided by IMCW.org.

A: A novelist who is a Catholic — and I think it’s not about subject matter. So what exactly do David Plante, Tobias Wolff, Richard Russo, Louise Erdrich, Flannery O’Connor, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Georges Bernanos have in common? Not a lot. But I think what Catholicism did at its best was tell us to pay attention. Things are serious and, ideally, things are a little bit more complicated than you think, and there might be a mystery behind things. What, again, I think is the genius of Catholicism is that it is incarnational, that is to say, God is human. And a novel is, by its definition, an incarnational form because it deals with the everyday, the here and now, all that Balzacian stuff — that ideally it has a vision that creates meaning and a larger sense of context. But, you know, we’re not in 1959, where we can say “the Catholic novelist” and Graham Greene says that you can be a person in the world and a Catholic and believe that, you know, at the end of the day, suffering is redemptive. It’s not like that anymore, and maybe it never was.

Q: It’s more difficult to define now?

A: Much more difficult to define, because luckily — and I’ll just talk about America now, because there probably are no European Catholic novelists anymore, because Europe is post-Christian — but I think for American Catholics most of us had to have at least a period where we left the church or were estranged from the church. Many haven’t gone back. But it’s not like, you know, we’re poster children for the church, and our relationship with the church is usually very ambivalent. Also, for most of my generation — I don’t think there are a lot of younger people who would define themselves as Catholic. The church we were brought up in is gone. So I think the temptation is to be nostalgic or to airbrush some stuff or to make it, you know, I mean, what is it, Sister Mary Ignatius or Father O’Malley. I mean, I think either temptation is to be avoided, and I think Catholic novelists who are serious, the ones that I mentioned, have avoided that polarity.

Q: Do you consider yourself a Catholic novelist?

A: Grace Paley said if you were a horse, you’d write as a horse. I am a Catholic, and I am a novelist. But to say Catholic novelist, again, it kind of smacks of 1958 where, you know, if you — if people read you and then immediately sign up for religious instruction at their local parish, you’re a success. I have absolutely no desire to proselytize, nor do I believe that, you know, Catholicism will make people’s lives better. So I write from a particular perspective, as somebody who was reared and trained with a particular set of assumptions, associations, contexts. But to say I’m a Catholic novelist suggests some sort of agenda, interestingly, in a way that to say “Jewish novelist” doesn’t. Nobody ever assumed that Bellow and Roth and Malamud wanted to make converts. But there’s a kind of attachment to the word “Catholic novelist” that I’m a little uncomfortable with. It suggests proselytizing, and that’s absolutely not what I’m interested in. What is interesting, I think, and believe me, if you want to hear things that are wrong about Catholicism, I can tell you. But there’s a kind of allowable prejudice against Catholicism. If you tell people you’re Catholic they immediately take 50 IQ points off you. And so I think that because I am perceived by people as a Catholic novelist, there is a whole group of readers that think they don’t have to read me, don’t want to read me. And so it’s kind of like if Hitler thinks you’re a Jew, you’re a Jew. People think I’m a Catholic novelist, and that affects the way I’m read, whether I think it or not.

Q: For good or for ill?

A: Yeah.

Q: Why did you decide to write this book [CIRCLING MY MOTHER] about your mother and her family and their religious life? What were you hoping to communicate?

A: Well, I didn’t decide to write the book. I found myself having written three pieces, and I looked at them and I thought, “You know, this is really a way of getting my mother back,” because my mother suffered from severe dementia for 11 years, and anybody who’s had that experience knows you lose the parent. The parent that you knew, the person that you knew, died, and then you have this sort of pathetic creature living a living death. And I wanted to get back past that, to recover a mother who was lively, gifted, difficult, and complicated, but not the pathetic creature that she was. And so I thought the way to get her back was to walk around her and think of all the different aspects of who she was — a mother, a friend, a worker, a person with a religious life, a sister.

Q: You end your book with a quotation from painter Pierre Bonnard about the relationship between looking and understanding. Could you elaborate on that idea a little bit?

A: As Bonnard says, looking is very hard work. I think that there’s a difference between glancing and looking. And, again, Simone Weil talks about the virtue of attentiveness, and I think that’s tremendously important, both for art and for life — that to look, to spend a long time looking, to look at what is not first evident, to look again, to see what’s there, to get rid of your own narcissism and to see what’s there rather than what you want to be there, I think, is a very important human exercise, and it’s the only way we can understand. It’s time-consuming, it’s painful, it’s exhausting, and it’s exactly what modern life disenables.

Q: It’s certainly what you did. You are looking so closely, almost lovingly in some passages, even as difficult as they are.

A: As I say to my students, the physical world is your friend, so sometimes when you’re trying to describe something psychological and you’re looking for psychological terms, it doesn’t work. But if you create an atmosphere or an envelope around the psychological experience, that’s often much more evocative or useful in describing an inner experience than trying to get to the inner experience without mediation.

Q: You say in the book that the dead are with us. There’s a presence. There’s no ending. What did you mean by that?

A: I really feel surrounded by my beloved dead, and there are some times where it’s almost literal, and particularly with my father, where I can say, “Hold my hand.” It’s not like, you know, there’s a hand there. We’re not talking about, you know, ghost movies. But I believe that love never ends, and if you loved and you were beloved, they’re with you. They’re around you. They can be called on. One can be accompanied by them, and I feel that very palpably. I feel that about the writers whom I’ve loved, too. And I think that’s what prayer is. We can make a connection. We can invoke those whom we have loved. I don’t think I’m going to open the closet door and see my father, and he’s going to say, you know, “Let’s go get a coffee at Starbucks.” But there is that presence that I think death doesn’t end.

Q: Let’s go back a minute to Catholics who write novels. It seems to me that a lot of the characters and even some of your characters — the most spiritual people in the books are also the ones filled with doubt. They’re the ones who are kind of messed up. Why is that significant for the Catholic writer? Why is doubt so significant?

A: I think one of the things that makes me like a certain kind of Catholicism better than a certain sort of fundamentalism is that at its best — and its best doesn’t happen that much, but let’s just pretend that it does — at its best Catholicism allows for complication and contradiction and pain. And I think what fundamentalism does and the reason why it’s so successful is it tries to flatten out contradiction, flatten out doubt, flatten out the pain. I mean, how can one believe in a loving God when one looks around and sees the horrors of the world, the suffering of children? I don’t have to enumerate all the horrors that there are. So any thinking person has to come up against the anguish and the frustration of an ideal of love and a world in which horrible suffering exists. And to not be anguished by that contradiction, I think, is almost impossible for a thinking person. So, you know, just to say, “It’s God’s will” and pretend that doesn’t hurt — that is using religion as a sort of anesthetic, and I think the most complex religious thinkers of all traditions don’t want religion to be an anesthetic. If you’re living a real religious life it should make your life harder, because you see more and you realize that wherever you stand you could be standing in another place, and that if you have a faith it’s certainly not going to be a faith that everything’s going to work out. You know, it’s not about praying to win the lottery, although I might do that. I also don’t think it’s going to work. But the complexity of a religious tradition, at its best, makes one live in contradiction, and contradiction is always painful and makes one somehow able to exist in a world in which contradiction and paradox and horrible suffering and great love exist simultaneously. So why would one not doubt? You know, you have to doubt every second.

Q: You mentioned the bias against Catholicism. Given what you’ve said about the intellectual rigor it takes to be a real person of faith, why do you feel you have to justify yourself sometimes?

A: Because the official church has acted like such idiots. You know, from the Enlightenment on the Catholic Church has placed itself against reason, against intellectual inquiry. Benedict XVI is still carrying on about modernism. If you look at Benedict, who claims to be an intellectual, he wants an intellectual life that stopped dead about 1650. And so there’s good reason to be prejudiced against the Catholic Church. It has not really said, you know — we are not on the side of free intellectual inquiry. And it has said many stupid things. It’s hard to respect a moral position that says contraception is a sin. I mean, you just have to think these people are brain-dead, so that if you then sign on with this brain-dead troupe, you must be brain-dead, too. So I absolutely understand people’s anger against the Catholic Church, and why they think, you know, it is against free thought. When Benedict XVI says he never met a homosexual you want to say you must be either the stupidest person in the world, or you’re on drugs. So when the hierarchy says these things of immense stupidity and then mandates them, as always, and people think being Catholic is signing on for that, of course they think you’ve got to be stupid or deluded. I totally understand it.

Q: But it sounds to me, beyond all of what you’re saying, that you still love being a Catholic.

A: I love being a Catholic in the same way that I love being an American, which is that most of the time I’m deeply ashamed to be both Catholic and American, and I have to believe that there is some tradition that is not immediately visible in current practice that I love very much, so that there is a way of being in the world that Catholicism, at its best, embodies, which is — everybody can be Catholic. You know, you don’t have to be Thomas Aquinas. You can be very simple and have access to great spiritual complexity and richness, so it connects you to the whole world. Rich, poor, educated, uneducated, people of all ethnicities, races — it is Catholic and I love that. It has a rich historical and cultural tradition. I like saying the same things that people said 2,000 years ago, the same words. You know, if I can say the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, that was being said by people in 200 AD, and in a very organic way the tradition of Western art is mine, in my fingertips, so my friends always think I’m this brilliant art historian because I can go, “Look, a Renaissance painting,” and there’s a woman holding a tray with eyes on it, and I say, “Oh, that’s St. Lucy.” And they say, “Oh, God, did you study Renaissance art?” No, when we had conjunctivitis we prayed to St. Lucy. So it’s a way of being connected. At its best, it demands social justice, social commitment, a solidarity with the poor, and it enables a very sophisticated mystical tradition. I don’t like one or the other. I don’t like, you know — sometimes the word “spiritual” makes me look for the exit sign, because it’s so solipsistic. I also think that people who only want social justice without embracing mystery and contemplation — I can’t go there either. So Catholicism at its best creates a fullness of possibilities for being human that’s very, very dear to me and people — who are willing to die for it, you know? I am of the church of Oscar Romero. I am of the church of those nuns in El Salvador who were killed. I am also of the church of Hildegard of Bingen and Shaw, Peguy, and Dorothy Day. So there are figures that I can look to who lived a life that has a fullness that’s very dear to me. What’s going on in the Vatican — not dear to me at all. What the American bishops do — not dear to me at all. But I like to think it’s too good for them. They can’t have it. They can’t keep me from it. And I guess what I feel sad about is so many of the best and the brightest are kept from their riches because of the deep stupidity and phobia of the institution.

Q: What does prayer mean to you? How do you experience prayer?

A: I think the experience of prayer and the experience of creation are very similar, and there is this kind of, again, attentiveness mixed with an openness that is necessary for both the creation of art and for prayer, so to be in that deep place where you are very, very focused and then saying “but I can’t do this by myself” and “be with me.” So it’s a sense of a desire for porosity. I think porosity is very important in both prayer and the creation of art — a moment of attentiveness and a moment when you’re outside the world and when you’re searching for a connection that quite often isn’t there. Writing and prayer both involve a lot of waiting, and I think that’s a very important discipline.

Q: You mentioned you write prayers.

A: I do.

Q: What kind of prayers do you write?

A: Well, I’ve done a whole series of prayers called “prayers for the un-prayed for,” and so I have prayers for liars, prayers for people who have made mistakes, prayers for sexual love, for people who spend money on clothing, for people whose work has come to nothing. I have a series of prayers for thanksgiving for places — thanksgiving for museums and cafes and riverbanks. I have a series of prayers of contrition, prayers asking forgiveness for our sins — the sins that we might not think of, for sins of inattention, for sins of the misuse of creation. And then I’m creating prayers for new feasts — the feast in celebration of companion animals, in thanksgiving for song and thanksgiving for comedy and thanksgiving for cosmetics and fashion and thanksgiving for cuisine. I love the idea that prayers can be about anything. But there’s a kind of form. They’re repetitive and they’re accessible and yet there’s a lot of quiet in them, so I like that.

Q: Did you start doing that for yourself, or was it something you always felt you would later publish?

A: You can’t ask that question of a writer. Every writer thinks, you know, someday maybe after I’m dead they’ll find this and they’ll say, “God, she was brilliant and we didn’t even know that.” So — I just wrote them. I never think, “What am I writing this for?” I just wrote them, and then later they were published, and actually a friend of mine, Suzzy Roche who’s from The Roches [the female vocal group of three songwriting sisters from New Jersey] is putting them to music. She actually has done two of them and made songs of them, so that’s exciting for me.

Q: You’ve also talked about the relationship between literature and religion and the role of the writer or the artist in religion. I wonder if you could just talk a bit about that.

A: I really don’t know what the role of the artist in religion is. What I think is sad is the separation between art and religion now, and we’re not in an age in which religious language, religious imagery is the coin of the realm. There are realms, again, of mystery and connectedness that artists really can’t draw on anymore. I felt I had to leave the whole system of Catholic thought and education in order to be the kind of artist that I wanted to be when I was young because, again, it was a notion that you had to toe a party line, and there was a kind of anxiety in the Catholic Church that I was growing up with that if you had ambitions to the great world, you were going to leave the parish and you’d never come back. So there was a kind of tamping down of imagination in the Catholic Church I grew up in. I had to leave it to feel that I was going to go out into the world, and I knew that the idiom of the art that I wanted was not religious, and I had to explore that, and I think it’s one reason why it’s very hard to create liturgy now that is genuinely contemporary and doesn’t die in the mouth, because it’s hard to get the idiom. There are some absolutely fabulous religious works being done. There’s a Scottish composer named James MacMillan who does amazing music. He did a choral piece on the Seven Last Words that’s just amazing and very contemporary, but the contemporary idiom is not religious, so to try to include it is a kind of high-wire act that can be very, very, very difficult and, again, many religious people don’t want the complexity that contemporary art insists upon. Contemporary art doesn’t want everything tied up, even in that Graham Greene way, and too many religious people want something tied up, and so the postmodern position of not being able to stay still in one place, and the kind of, I think, oversimplified religious position that too many religious people have — there’s not a good communication between the two of them. So, you know, when the pope says that postmodernism is about not believing in anything, there’s nothing that you think is true, you know, as if we were all, you know, taking drugs and having sex with geese and that was fine — there’s such hostility between the two camps and great hostility amongst most artists to anything religious, again because they think you’re just stupid or you’re falling for something, or you’re not looking hard enough. So there’s not a good communication between the two realms.

Q: Why do we humans have a longing for beauty and meaning?

A: I don’t know. It’s a great mystery because it doesn’t seem to help us evolutionarily very much. Or maybe it does in a way that I’m not smart enough to know. But, you know, if it’s just about the strongest surviving, what does looking at a sunset do for that? I mean, supposing there’s another animal, you know. If there’s a big guy with a club behind you, you’re not going to [say] “excuse me, I’m just looking at this sunset, so could you please not hit me over the head or eat me?” So it seems to me this desire for beauty and the desire for meaning are very mysterious, and for me they’re hints of something. They’re hints of a hunger for something that is not reachable except through something transcendent, some transcendent person. But people really yearn for beauty. They define it differently, and I don’t care about that, but what is that? People can be in terrible situations of poverty, and they want to hang a flower up on the wall, or they want to paint something, or they want to wear some cloth that’s colorful. The desire to ornament and mark the desire for variety is such a wonderful human thing, and it seems to come up again and again. And why do we want meaning? I mean, it is ridiculous. You can walk across the street and be hit by car. A great artist ends up dribbling into a cup with Alzheimer’s, and good people suffer terribly. Children suffer. Bad people do very well. There shouldn’t be a desire for meaning. Life should have told us that there is no meaning, and we keep searching for it, and we keep being angry when we don’t have it. So what is that hunger? What is that appetite? I don’t know. It’s very mysterious to me. But it seems to me an important way of understanding or at least framing the question, what is it to be human?

Q: How do you think what you call “more nuanced” religions can make themselves heard?

A: I think that through their fruits you will know them. One of the ways Catholicism has made itself known in the world is by being with the poor, by taking positions of courage, and so I think that it’s not going to be about talking. It’s about being places and making a life of witness. I think that if you are with people in their grief and their joy, and you live that complexly, you’re going to draw people to you. One of the reasons that fundamentalism works — I don’t think it’s helpful to say all fundamentalists have to be stupid or wicked. It’s just that people are stupid and wicked and that’s why they’re doing this. People are terrified. I think that fear is the dominant tonality in the world now. We’re overwhelmed, and there’s a lot to be afraid of. And as I always say, I’m terrified in turbulence in the air, and so when there’s turbulence in the air I don’t want a pilot saying to me, “I’m quite well trained, and, you know, in these situations there’s a 70 percent chance that I will be able to fly the plane. But there’s that 30 percent chance — because there could be a wind sheer, and then if there’s a wind sheer, we’re really screwed.” I want a pilot when I’m in turbulence to say, “I’m going to land the plane, don’t worry.” I think most people — many people are living now as if they were in turbulence all the time and they want the captain to say, “I’m going to land the plane.” What I think is the job of a more nuanced religious tradition is to say, “I hope the plane will land. I will be with you even if it doesn’t land. I don’t understand why it might crash, but I’m with you, and I’m not going to lie to you.” I would like to think that that — but it has to be a convincing: “I will be with you.” And fundamentalists have been with people, and we — I think we have to practice “with-ness.” “With-ness” and witness will be a way of being heard and creating an alternative to the kind of screaming which breaks through the loudness of fear, because fear is very loud.

Q: You call it “the dominant narrative of fear.”

A: The dominant narrative of fear, and I think the right wing is brilliant at manipulating that. So, you know, a lot of people do want to destroy us. There are terrorists who could blow up a New York subway at any moment. Things could be in the water that would kill us all. The environment is being degraded. The economy seems to be completely out of control. Nobody seems to be able to understand the world economy anymore. So of course it’s scary. The question is how do we live with fear, and is it more scary than it used to be? So when there were plagues, when there were constant wars — that was scary, too. The point is do you live in fear or do you live in hope? Hope is not optimism. Hope is not saying it’s all going to turn out all right. But I think the challenge for a religious perspective is how do we live in a climate of fear? The fear is not wrong, but to make your decisions and your choices based on it is probably not very wise, is not very helpful. And I don’t know how to do that. I wish I did. But I think it has to be about witness, and presence, and hope against hope. And tell the truth. I’d like to think that if you tell the truth and you’re present with people, that will be more effective than saying, you know, if you send me money you’ll get a lot of money and, you know, if you pray you will be successful. Now I understand that if somebody was in the grips of an addiction, for example, that sort of fundamentalist certainty could be very helpful in a way that my more nuanced approach is not going to help. So, you know, I think there are tonalities for everybody. That’s okay. But I would like there to be at least on the airwaves a more complicated, a more nuanced, and a more truthful tone. But if we’re going to do that we have to be with people in a way that I think we’re not always so willing to be.

Q: How can a highly educated, successful woman feel comfortable in a patriarchal religion like Catholicism?

A: You can’t feel comfortable. You’d have to be, again, an idiot to feel comfortable in Catholicism. I’m not comfortable, and I’m angry all the time. So I guess what I feel — I have to take the long view and to say that the notion that women were equal to men is very new in the history of the species. I have to, you know, speak as loud as I can, not pretend it’s okay, but to say this church has a long history and it doesn’t move very quickly. But if all the women get out of it, then it’s only these creeps in the Vatican that own it. So the way that I stay is I’m a street fighter, that if I get out they win, and they’re not going to win. So it’s not comfortable. It’s an embattled position. But I think one has to be somewhat historically patient while screaming. I mean, that doesn’t sound like that makes sense, but patience and screaming, I think, is the way that I do it. Not to repress, not to say it’s okay — to keep witnessing but not to leave, because if you leave then they win, and they are not going to win without my giving them a fight.

Q: Is that the type of thing you say to young women?

A: Yes, I do, and I think it’s true in all institutions. Unless women get in there and fight it’s very hard. People — men do not want women to take power alongside them. Nobody wants to give up privilege; nobody wants to give up power. I don’t, you don’t. It takes patience, and it takes witness. It takes a little wit. Sometimes you have to schmooze and entertain them a little bit and find a place where you can be together. There have got to be some things that we do agree on and to stand there, but not to get out just because it’s hard. I mean, as women we’re in a very transitional period in history — and to remember it’s very new. Women have only been voting in America for less than a century. I think women got the vote in France in something like 1960 — I mean, really bizarre. And so I think a historical patience combined with the good energy that anger can give you is the way, and that’s what I do tell the students. Don’t give up.

Q: In CIRCLING MY MOTHER you talk about the relationship between your mother, her friends, and Catholic priests. Describe the relationships that existed in those days and whether you think such close relationships could exist today.

A: Well, my mother and her friends, mostly unmarried, had very intense relations with priests who took them very seriously. Spiritually, they were their confessors, and that relationship enabled women to talk about their inner lives with men who took them seriously and paid attention. I don’t think it was sexual. I think it was romantic, and in that all romance is sexual, I guess it was sexual. But there was no placing A on B as far as I can see. But these priests made them feel connected to a larger world, and they took them seriously. So my mother went on retreats with her girlfriends, you know, and they would go away for a weekend. They would stay in convents. They would be served, they didn’t have to cook, they didn’t have to clean up. They got to pray and listen to spiritual conversations, and they adored these priests, and they did go to them for advice. Some of the advice was disastrous, some of it was helpful. But it was a connection with a man that wasn’t about keeping them in their place but was about taking them seriously and opening them up to a larger world. The whole identity of the priest is so different now. Now I have very, very close friends that are priests. But I don’t worship them, and they will ask me for advice in a way that a priest would never ask a woman for spiritual — whatever spiritual means. I mean, they might say, you know, “Do you think I should buy this car?” But they would never say, “How do you think I should adjust my prayer life?” Whereas my friends who are priests, we’re friends, and we’re kind of in it together, and we’re all struggling, and it’s not a hierarchical relationship. I mean, I love them, but I’m not romantic. I don’t think, you know — I’d rather hang out with George Clooney if I want romance, or Hugh Laurie, who I’d really like to hang out with. But priests don’t have that kind of shimmer for me that they did for my mother. They’re my friends, and we share interests, and we’re trying to figure out how to live this crazy life. There’s still, I think, probably a kind of priest and a kind of woman that wants to replicate that old way of being. But it’s almost impossible, because the shimmer around the priesthood is gone.

Q: What trends other than the obvious ones do you see circling the Catholic Church?

A: I think that the Catholic Church as I know it is not going to be recognizable in 50 years. For one thing, it’s not going to be a European church anymore. It was the Roman Catholic Church, and as it’s not going to be European, it’s going to be different from anything I know. It’s probably not going to be American either. It’s going to have to be less clerical. It could be a kind of hideous neo-colonialist institution in which people from the developing countries who thought it was their ticket to ride were in charge of it and are very conservative. There might be little samizdat groups of little sort of cells of people who are more progressive, meeting together outside institutions. Women meeting together. I just don’t know. I don’t see a lot of young people from America and Europe being very hooked into Catholicism. And so I feel that what will happen will not be recognizable to me, and it could be very, very interesting, but I don’t know what it’s going to be. It’s not going to be a Eurocentric church anymore, and as my church is very Eurocentric, I can’t really predict. It could be really great, but in ways — I have to have faith that the church always changes, and, you know, we are not the church of 1400. We’re not the church of 1700. We’re not the church of 1900. But it’s very, very hard to predict, as it will have to do with globalization, communication. I think it’ll be very interesting, because it still is the Catholic Church. It still is something that has worldwide roots. I just — I don’t know. I think it’s going to be a very interesting, unknowable time.

Q: What’s your next project?

A: I’m actually writing a book about Jesus that’s called READING JESUS, and it is an attempt to create an alternative reading practice to the fundamentalist reading practice, and an alternative to a scholarly reading practice, because it seems to me, again, you have to look at the fundamentalists and say what hunger are they feeding that the likes of us haven’t fed? So I’m trying to look at the Gospels, to look at their words and see what the words say, not what I want them to say, or what I need them to say, but really what’s there in all its complexity, and to respond to that as a person who has lived her life reading and writing, and to come to terms with the complexity, the contradictions — the parts of the Gospel I don’t like so much, the parts of the Gospel I find irreplaceable. Who is this person Jesus whom we find in words in the way that we find King Lear or Raskolnikov in words, but the relationship to words is so different? So that’s what I’m doing now. And then I’m writing a novel set in Rome.

Not quite halfway into Alice McDermott’s wonderful new novel AFTER THIS (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), John Keane, abed with a slipped disk, contemplates in a mirror the reflection of a crucifix that hangs above the bed and behind his back — a wedding gift from the priest who had married Keane and his wife, Mary. He sees “the tiny gold Christ curled against the thick cross. Thick in this particular case, he knew, because behind the tortured figure on the ivory cross there was a secret compartment that contained two candles and a vial of holy water, the accoutrements of Last Rites.”

“It had not been difficult for them,” McDermott writes, “bred-in-the-bones Catholics, Irish Catholics, even at the beginning of their lives together to imagine the final scene: the candles flickering on the bedside table, the holy water glistening on his forehead, the hushed air, the dim lights, the children kneeling at this bedside, and his wife, her hand over his, assuring him, assuring him, forgiving, in the last minutes left to them, assuring and forgiving. It was a scenario he no longer deemed likely. His brother had clutched his heart and hit the pavement on Thirty-fourth Street, already gone.”

Author Alice McDermott

It is a patented McDermott moment — the writing strong and supple, the incident textured and telling, a moment of meaning and loss that even in its matter-of-factness hints at transcendence and an assurance “that pain wasn’t all, in the end. That something would trump the foolishness of body and bone, day after day.” It is the sort of moment and the kind of writing that grasps what the Church calls Ordinary Time — time ordered for the everyday living of a Christian life — and that has marked McDermott as the most distinct and interesting voice of a new generation of Catholic novelists.

“Catholic novelist,” like any label, should be used with caution. McDermott has called herself a “reluctant, resigned, occasionally exasperated but nevertheless practicing Catholic with no thought, or hope, of ever being otherwise,” and certainly her novels, especially AFTER THIS, are suffused with the materiality — the prayers and the rosaries, the incense and the gestures — of popular Catholicism in the three decades following the end of World War II.

But she is not a Catholic or Christian novelist as that term is used these days in some, especially evangelical, religious circles, where novels are marketed and categorized as “Christian” because their narrative style employs a theological Procrustean bed to ensure a “proper” uplifting ending. One is reminded of Flannery O’Connor’s criticism of such a writer, “so entranced with his Christian state that he forgets his nature as a fiction writer.” O’Connor added, “Poorly written novels — no matter how pious and edifying the behavior of their characters — are not good in themselves and are therefore not really edifying.”

At the same time, the Catholicism of McDermott’s novels represent a sharp break from her forerunners, from O’Connor, Graham Greene, and J.F. Powers. She writes without the existential “grotesque” of O’Connor, without the worldly but still religious “whiskey” priests of Greene or the corporate, spiritually empty clerics of Powers. Instead, McDermott’s Catholicism is, in part, an environment. Her characters are like fish swimming in the sea of faith, and her theme, in part, is the drying and shrinking of that milieu as it is experienced by a working-class-becoming-middle-class Irish Catholic family.

AFTER THIS begins and ends at the edge of church. Its opening words, “Leaving the church,” are immediately suggestive, and its final scene, a small, private wedding party gathered at a church door as a priest pronounces the book’s final sentence, “It’s a gift, then,” is a perfectly realized coda, a statement if not of amazing than certainly of enduring grace.

In between, the novel is, first of all, a straightforward, beautifully realized and poignant portrait of a family — John and Mary Keane and their four children. It is also a complex and compassionate meditation on change and its ineluctable costs. Finally and most movingly, it is about religious faith, its erosion and, equally important, its persistence in the face of change and loss. The story is set in the years following World War II, when the nation’s economy was rapidly expanding, transforming the working class into the newly suburbanized middle class. As the 1950s turned into the 1960s and 1970s, another war — Vietnam — and the sexual revolution seemed to overwhelm families even in their newfound prosperity.

McDermott is an acute observer with a fine eye for detail, and she renders the fabric of these middle class Irish Catholic lives with a similar but more restrained and loving verbal craft than Protestant John Updike described the small-town Pennsylvania churchgoers of his early novels and short stories. For example, as Mary and her daughter Annie stand in line waiting to see Michelangelo’s Pieta at the 1964 World’s Fair, “They shuffled forward. In the boredom and the heat there were only the tender backs of necks to consider, arches of ears, puckered elbows, freckles, birthmarks, The variety of head shapes and hair colors. What wash-day mishap or expense spared or birthday gift or Simplicity pattern had led to those clothes on that body on this day. A missed belt loop. A plastic purse. A bleached beehive. A baggy pair of Bermuda shorts. A lip held over a protruding tooth. You had to pity anyone in long pants or black socks. Women in white gloves. Soldiers in uniform. You had to pity the man behind them for the hair on his arms, the woman’s weight against him.”

McDermott’s narrative is episodic and anecdotal, covering its 30 years in a spare 279 pages. It is held together by two primary themes. The first, almost unobtrusive, is the omnipresence of war, both real and imaginary. John Keane has been wounded in World War II; his first son, Jacob, is named after a fellow soldier killed in the war and Jacob, in turn, is given up to the war in Vietnam. In between, in two significant moments of the Keane children at play, war is their make-believe. Related to the war theme is the sexual revolution, which in differing ways sweeps up and scatters Jacob’s three siblings, and McDermott has written some of the most sensitive passages in contemporary fiction on abortion and how it has been experienced in the Catholic community. “An Act of Contrition started up in her head,” McDermott writes of a young woman as she rests after undergoing the procedure at a clinic. “‘Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee,’ more a habit of mind than a plea for absolution. Because she could not balance any remorse against the dawning sense of relief. However terrible it might be, what she had done, it was over: gotten through, finished. However terrible it was, its immediate effect was that she could go back to school next week, her senior year.

She could take the SATs, go to the prom, go to graduation. She could sleep late tomorrow and go downstairs in her work clothes and her smock — ‘Going’ — her car keys in her hand, her father singing from another room, ‘It was a lucky April shower, it was the most convenient door,’ sweet and affectionate and naive as he always was because he had no fear of trouble for this beautiful child, no quicksand, no terrible diversions, no nightmares to drive her from the room he and his son had plumbed and paneled with their own hands.”‘

Later in the novel, on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, a nun with polio gives a terrifying but compelling lecture to her class of young women students: “‘Girls,’ she said again, more forcefully, as if she were now girded for battle. ‘The men who make our laws see women as being as capable of murdering their unborn children as men have always been of abandoning them. They see all women as equals to Medea, should the circumstances arise. They are blind to women like my mother who put their children above all else, who labor and worry and die ‘ — she paused, her large round eyes seeming to search for the word, her two hands clutching the crutches she had placed across her lap. Her voice had not risen an octave. ‘Died tired,’ she said finally, and then raised her eyebrows as if she was surprised to discover that the word she had searched for was such a simple one.”

The second major theme, more overt, is the deeply felt but waning popular Catholic spirituality of the 1940s and 1950s — the rosary, prayers like “Angel of God,” the tradition of confession. All of these, while sustaining Mary and John, are under assault in the new America emerging in the 1950s and 1960s, and the children, each in their own way, slip away from them. Yet there are fleeting moments of remembrance. In one scene, Michael, the Keanes’ second son, recalls the Salve Regina — “Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy. Our life, our sweetness and our hope” — and realizes “how even after you’d disentangled yourself from everything else, the words stayed with you.” It is, as the writer Peter Quinn has observed, the prayer from which McDermott has taken the novel’s title: “To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us, and after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb.” For Michael Keane these have become “words you could dismiss as a joke as readily as you could claim them as the precise definition of everything your wanted.”

McDermott captures the sense of forfeiture beautifully in several scenes centered on the decision to tear down the parish’s old church and replace it with a modern building and parochial school. John Keane sits on the parish committee charged with bringing the new building into being, and at the end of one difficult meeting, in sentences unlikely for most American novelists, McDermott writes: “Mr. Keane got into his cold car. Let the engine run a bit. The other men were pulling out of the drive and he saluted them as they drove past. They had done the work of their church.” It is a marvelous, telling incident, plunked into the midst of an American spirituality so focused on the individual that it fails to understand either the ordinariness or the corporateness of Christian discipleship.

But the new church John Keane helps bring into being is also a symbol of both the loss of the past and a changing faith in the turmoil following Vatican II — the new church with its “Bawl Room” so infants’ cries would not disturb the Mass; confessionals turned into small rooms; pews without the brass hat clips that had been on the back of the old pews: “He understood there was no longer a need for them — so few men wore hats anymore (he blamed JFK with his thick hair and his big Irish head for changing the fashion) — but the lack of them added to his own dawning sense that the new church had turned the stuff of his own past, his own memories, into something quaint, at best. At worst, obsolete.”

Two non-family members also play crucial and symbolic roles in the novel. Pauline, Mary Keane’s close friend, is a wounded and maimed soul who tries Mary’s commitment to Jesus’ admonition to “feed my lambs” and “who always saw the dashed tear, the torn seam, who remembered the cruel word, the failed gesture, who knew that none of them would get by on good intentions alone, or on the aspirations of their pretty faith.” But, as Mary realizes, “What was the cost of a little kindness toward someone who found her pleasure in being unkind? What was the good, as Sister Clare at school used to say, in loving only the lovable?” And there is Mr. Perischetti, a nurse at the state hospital for the mentally ill who calls his patients “God’s mistakes” and seems something of both the Good Samaritan and the suffering servant who has known his share of sorrow.

While brilliantly evoking the impact of war and sexual revolution on families, their community, and the Church, there seems a curious silence on one other equally important social movement of the era that had its national impact — civil rights. It may well be that the movement did not reach into the insular Catholic community of Long Island in the same way war and sex did. But one of the indelible images of the era is of nuns and priests marching in civil rights demonstrations. Perhaps the book’s silence on this topic is as truthful as any effort to manufacture an influence that wasn’t there.

McDermott deservedly won the National Book Award in 1998 for her novel CHARMING BILLY. AFTER THIS is every bit as good, and it takes her to a new level of achievement. Together, her slowly growing body of work — there are now six novels — comes together not just as one of the most insightful and accurate sociological portraits of Catholicism in the second half of the 20th century but as an eloquent, even exquisite, if one may be permitted the word, witness to the perseverance and also transformation of the faith in the lives of ordinary families.

David E. Anderson is senior editor of Religion News Service. He has written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on Bob Dylan, Marilynne Robinson’s novel GILEAD, and most recently on the ethics of torture.

]]>KIM LAWTON: Two years ago, when Senator John Kerry ran for president, many religious Democrats were disappointed that he didn’t speak more directly about his Catholic faith and how that faith influences his politics. This week, he made that speech.

At Pepperdine University in California, John Kerry outlined his vision of how faith can—and should—play a role in public life. Quoting frequently from the New Testament, he described how his Roman Catholic beliefs shape many of his policy positions, and he suggested a moral agenda he believes many people of faith can share.

Senator JOHN KERRY (in speech at Pepperdine University): I lay out these four great challenges—fighting poverty and disease, taking care of the earth, reducing abortions, and fighting only just wars—as godly tasks on which we can transcend the culture wars and actually reach common ground.

LAWTON: In the speech, he also gave the most detailed and personal account to date of his own spiritual journey. He told me it has been difficult for him to talk about these things.

Sen. KERRY: What I found was that if you don’t explain what your foundation is, and you don’t share with the people the fullness of how you come to whatever faith it is you have or don’t have, then people fill in the gaps for you, and that’s even more dangerous.

LAWTON: He spoke of a long time of searching after he had lost the faith of his youth. I asked him to describe the spiritual revelation that he says brought him back some years ago.

Sen. KERRY: It was tangible. I mean, you could really sense a kind of input that really surprised me. I don’t know where it came from. You know, people can describe how those things come. It really changed how I was thinking about myself and God and my relationship to the church, and answers came that hadn’t been there previously.

LAWTON: He now describes his faith as “very real.”

Sen. KERRY: You know, I still sometimes question certain things. It’s just my nature. I can sometimes be a little more linear. But the test of reason and faith is an ongoing test. But it’s very real with me. The fundamentals are there, and there’s a confidence about it. The certain certainty that comes with you—maybe it’s something that happens with age, maybe it’s something that comes with the spirit. But whatever it is, it’s a good feeling.

]]>There’s a movement under way among many Catholic women and women scholars to revise the reputation of Mary Magdalene. For centuries, she was reviled as a prostitute. But now, with the discovery of ancient text, several recent movies and novels are portraying her as an important figure in early church history.

]]>BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: In the aftermath of 9/11, the daily headlines talked of bombers in Afghanistan and the search for Osama bin Laden. Away from the headlines, in thousands of homes across the U.S., families were dealing with their very private and personal grief. How many sought comfort in their faith cannot be known. But many who did, found that comfort.

Mary Alice Williams spoke with two of them.

KATY SOULAS: We turned CNN on and smoke was billowing from the building and it was dark and I knew he was up higher than the impact of the plane, and at that point I felt like I was Mary watching Jesus die on the cross. I immediately felt too that it was going to be quicker for him than it was for Jesus.

MARY ALICE WILLIAMS: Katy and Timothy Soulas had been high-school sweethearts, shared a life and five children, with another on the way. Danny will never know his daddy.

Neither will Arielle and Olivia Russin. Four days before they were born, Andrea was with her two-year-old, Alec, when she heard the news bulletins. The plane hit 20 floors below her husband’s office.

ANDREA RUSSIN: When I dropped my son off at school, I didn’t want to give in to the fact that I needed God. I said, “No. It is not that important. I am not going to stop”. Then I got to a synagogue and the rabbi there gave me some prayers that were supposed to be helpful in bringing Steve home. They didn’t work.

WILLIAMS: Andrea Russin was not alone in questioning her faith in a loving and protective God who could have allowed this to happen.

Ms. RUSSIN: I think that God tried on many occasions to stop everybody who went into those buildings from going into those buildings. If you speak to mostly every family, everybody has a story, I think, that some angels were stronger than others and some people didn’t go to work that day. And there were a large percent of people who were not in that building that day who were supposed to be, and that is how I have justified this.

WILLIAMS (to Ms. Russin): Where does that put Steve? Why did he go?

Ms. RUSSIN: He had to go to work so we could have the time when the babies were born.

WILLIAMS: Andrea Russin is Jewish; Katy Soulas, Catholic.

Ms. SOULAS: I think in our faith it is important to realize that there are many mysteries in life and we are not going to know the whys — as to why God took Daddy before we were through.

WILLIAMS: What in Catholicism has brought you the most comfort through this time?

Ms. SOULAS: I think it is the fact that we believe in heaven and Tim is with God. And in that sense he is our angel and we can pray to him to help us get through these days. That evening, I felt Tim with me, saying, “I’m okay, I am with God. And I want you to be at peace with that.” And it was a feeling almost of relief.

Chaplain (COL) PHILLIP HILL: We look at death as a transition point from this life to the next. Our liturgy reflects that.

WILLIAMS: Army Chaplain Phillip Hill is stationed at the Pentagon. He was there last September 11.

Chaplain (COL) HILL: We believe that once a person leaves this life and is given the opportunity to spend with God — I mean, what better could you want?

WILLIAMS (to Rabbi Eliseo Rozenwasser): Where is Steve?

Rabbi ELISEO ROZENWASSER: That is a very difficult question to answer. And I would say Steve is here. Steve is in what Andrea is doing and Alec and in the twins that were born after September 11. It is not part of Jewish teaching, someone going to heaven and that kind of thing.

WILLIAMS (to Rabbi Rozenwasser): How important is the community in helping the loss of someone like this?

Rabbi ROZENWASSER: I think it is fundamental. Judaism is based on the concept of community. When someone dies and right after burial, the first thing we have is a week of shiva — when the community comes to the house of mourners to comfort them. It is allowing the mourners to have a very clean period in terms of the only preoccupation they have on their minds is to be able to mourn their loss.

Ms. RUSSIN: Theoretically, we had already started mourning, and so I chose to sit for seven days because I wanted whatever prayers were to be said for Steve to be said. And I wanted to make sure that I did whatever I could for him. And for his soul to be able to go on.

WILLIAMS: Andrea’s synagogue organized 70 people per week at two-hour intervals to help out. At one point, there was a three-week waiting period for volunteers.

Ms. RUSSIN: My religious community has been my extended family. They have been there for me when everything was falling apart around me. And having company through the time that is most shocking and upsetting to you, to me was very comforting. People making food and coming and just being part of my life really helped me to transition from having my husband here to having nobody here.

WILLIAMS: Katy’s help came from a parish-sponsored interfaith support group.

Ms. SOULAS: They made sure there was lunch and tissues and candles burning softly and there was beautiful music, and they gave us an atmosphere that we could go to and feel safe.

WILLIAMS: In the Jewish tradition, survivors like Andrea often leave an endowment or memorial to their lost loved one, as a way of integrating the person’s memory into the lives of the living and to leave a positive imprint on the world. Andrea’s memorial to Steven is in the works.

Ms. RUSSIN: Steve loved to play. He was a child at heart. I am trying to put up a playground so kids can play on it and be happy. It will be a place where my children would be regularly and I think that it is a living monument rather than a headstone in a cemetery.

WILLIAMS: Andrea’s Jewish community has given her solace and, she says, a renewed faith in human nature. Katy finds strength in her Catholic confidence in the kingdom of heaven.

(to Ms. Soulas): Could you have done this without faith?

Ms. SOULAS: No, absolutely not. I look at people who have said to me, “I wish I felt God the way you do,” and I don’t feel they are as much at peace as I am. Not that I am at peace. I definitely have very difficult times that I am facing, but I see in others more anger. And although I will always have the heartache, I feel that God isn’t giving me anything I can’t handle.

I think my faith has enabled me to realize that God’s plan is different than mine. And that I need to rely on him.

WILLIAMS (to Ms. Soulas): Is it better than yours?

Ms. SOULAS: Of course it is better than mine — though I will question that when I get to heaven. God, I hope I get there. I have a bone to pick with you, God. I have said that to the kids. I have been angry at God. How could you leave me like this? What are you thinking? I don’t like it like this. That’s his plan. We have to accept that and learn what it is we need to take from it and run with it. The choice that I have been given now is to follow him or go astray. To be happy or to be miserable. I would rather be happy.